Using Social Media to Build Meaningful Relationships
Based on Authenticity, Character and Integrity<

Academics are tasked to teach their students the requisite skills and knowledge required to perform professionally.  Often times this leads to heavy reliance upon theory at the expense of teaching practical ways to address and manage problems in the workplace.

The theoretical models often go through rigorous review and debate in journals and conferences before making it into the classroom, a process that from start to finish might take years.  I’m reminded here of a conversation I had recently with Shannon Arvizu, a doctoral candidate in Environmental Sociology at Columbia University, who published an article on new media that took almost 2 years to go to print.

The challenge our institutions of higher learning now face is that the world changes too fast – imagine, for example, you wrote an article on Twitter or Facebook, it would be completely irrelevant by the time it was ready to publish because of the field of social media is so rapidly evolving and changing.

I came across an excellent article by Andrew J. Hoffman called “Deconstructing the Ivory Tower: Business schools’ reliance on theory-driven research ignores the pressing needs of real-world managers.” Hoffman, Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, emphasizes the importance of bringing in professionals with relevant experience to teach MBA students, but I think there is an underlying greater issue which is that so much discourse about theory has led some of the world’s most brilliant people into a sollipsistic conversation with one another that may have no practical relevance to anyone outside of the academy.

It is not simply that practical wisdom must be imparted to students, but practical wisdom must be imparted to professors in scalable ways.  Particularly in my field of social media strategy there is very little that an academic could teach me who did not have tactical experience executing campaigns and intricate knowledge of how the technology worked.

It is my sincere hope that as Think Now Yes evolves it will help to fill some of these gaps with relevant insights from the trenches, and in the long run the Ivory Tower doesn’t have the same fate as the Tower of Babel.